On April 17, 2025 a haunting portrait of a nine-year-old Palestinian boy who lost both arms during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024 won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year Award.
The picture was taken by Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times newspaper, and depicts Mahmoud Ajjour.
According to Al Jazeera Ajjour was evacuated to Doha after an explosion severed one arm and mutilated the other and is now struggling to adapt to life after that dreadful day.
When interviewed he said: ‘At first, I thought I had simply fallen. But I found myself on the ground, exhausted, and wondering what had happened.’
Unaware that he had sustained serious wounds Ajjour looked around and saw that one arm ‘flew off, and one flew and fell right beside me.’ Later, when his mother told him that he had lost his arms he started crying. ‘I was very sad, and my mental state was very bad.’
Like many others in Gaza, Ajjour underwent surgery without anaesthetics due to a severe lack of medical supplies. ‘They performed surgery on me while I was awake. I couldn’t bear the pain. I was screaming very loud. My voice filled the hallways.’
Ajjour is one of thousands of children in Gaza who are suffering life-changing injuries due to relentless, indiscriminate Israeli bombardment.
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, more than 1000 children have lost one or both their legs since October 7, 2023.
In December 2024 UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said ‘Gaza has the highest number of children amputees per capita anywhere in the world – many losing limbs and undergoing surgeries without even anaesthesia.’
Ajjour is now learning to write, play games on his phone, and dress himself using his feet, but he still needs special assistance for most daily activities.
‘Everything is difficult, including feeding myself, helping myself to the bathroom … but I try my best’ he said. ‘I manage my life like this. I make it work.’
Hermetic astrology teaches that three key factors influenced the event that Ajjour experienced and that of these planetary energies operate indirectly. The two immediate factors were his soul’s thought-cell activity and his physical environment – Gaza.
It teaches that thought-cell activity and physical environment have an equal influence on the importance of an event that occurs.
Thought-cells work with whatever energy they acquire to bring about physical conditions and events corresponding to their desires and the way they feel and influenced by their conditioning by previous experience they can desire fortunate-beneficial or unfortunate-detrimental events.
Your birth chart maps your soul’s thought-cell organization and your progressed chart indicates when major progressions are supplying planetary energy to specified thought-cells boosting their normal level of activity and stimulating them to work to attract an event that your local environment facilitates.
In regard to the event experienced by Mahmoud Ajjour three definite assumptions can be made.
- He had a progressed aspect to Mars (the explosion) in his birth chart indicating his aggressive (Mars) thought-cells were active and desiring a Mars event.
- He had a progressed aspect to the ascendant or a planet in house 1 indicating an event involving his physical body. And
- He had a progressed aspect to a Mercury or a planet in Gemini indicating an event involving his arms.
But the nature and severity of the event puts the chief focus on his physical environment – Gaza.
The power, harmony or discord of Mars, house 1 and Gemini in his chart are not known and if he lived in a peaceful neighbourhood in a peaceful country his aggressive (Mars) thought-cell activity may have attracted a cut to his hand or a broken finger.
The explosion event that blew his arms off was facilitated and made possible by his local environment.
Lost limbs and the astral body
The astral form, to the extent it has the proper material to use and the ability to use it, is the pattern into which the physical body is made to conform.
When a child’s physical body is deprived of calcium through a deficiency in the food, no amount of thinking can build strong bones; but if the child’s birth chart aka its astral pattern indicates a large frame, the thought-cells will do the best they can, to not only utilize the calcium that’s available, but to attract calcium to the child’s diet and build a body to fit the astral pattern.
Now some lizards, when their tails are broken off or eaten by a predatory creature, have the ability to grow a new tail which, although not so long as the old one, tends to fill the astral pattern. Crabs which lose their claws in battle or accident are able to grow news ones. But this power of regenerating lost organs is limited with most animals.
But whether a human or animal the loss of a limb does not destroy the astral limb. The fact that the human or animal does not grow a new limb is not due to an alteration of the astral pattern but due to the inability of the physical life processes under the circumstances to fill in that pattern.
On the astral plane the human or animal continues to possess the limb which physically is missing. And when his physical death occurs Ajjour’s astral body will not be deprived of his astral arms.
Elbert Benjamine’s words are scattered throughout this article. Mahmoud Ajjour’s story is from Al Jazerra.
Astrology for Aquarius – sharing our knowledge
